Betty Parsons, Marcia Tucker, and Alanna Heiss Cyndi Conn Skidmore College
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Skidmore College Creative Matter Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) Student Academic Departments and Programs Scholarship 5-22-2010 Nerve Endings: Betty Parsons, Marcia Tucker, and Alanna Heiss Cyndi Conn Skidmore College Follow this and additional works at: https://creativematter.skidmore.edu/mals_stu_schol Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Arts Management Commons Recommended Citation Conn, Cyndi, "Nerve Endings: Betty Parsons, Marcia Tucker, and Alanna Heiss" (2010). Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) Student Scholarship. 66. https://creativematter.skidmore.edu/mals_stu_schol/66 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Academic Departments and Programs at Creative Matter. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) Student Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Creative Matter. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Nerve Endings: Betty Parsons, Marcia Tucker, and Alanna Heiss by Cyndi Conn FINAL PROJECT SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN LIBERAL STUDIES SKIDMORE COLLEGE April 2010 Advisors: Kathryn Davis, Tom Huhn INTRODUCTION When initially presented, new forms of art and installation can incite hostility and derision among art patrons, critics, and general audiences. New paradigms are unsettling and artistic breakthroughs can threaten belief systems people hold dear to their understanding of the art world and how it functions. Some of the most distinguished and iconic artists in modem history have found notoriety and recognition through years, even decades, of slowly evolving acceptance into the cultural mainstream. Once labeled charlatans heralding a clear decline in culture, such eminent artists as Theodore Gericault, Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, and Marcel Duchamp incited public fury and scathing criticism in their respective eras for the ground-breaking work they produced. By challenging the conventions of how art is supposed to look and function, artists ,operating outside that norm encounter a public largely unprepared and unwilling to accept their permutations. As history has shown, when presented with boundary-crossing art, audiences "take out their own anxiety about change out on those who have 1 attempted ...to rearrange the prevailing power relationships" In many respects, the curator or director who chooses to present original work to a frequently bewildered and uncomfortable audience shares quite closely the challenges that face cutting-edge artists. Curators and directors promoting distinctively innovative contemporary art meet with harsh castigation for the work they present. In their attempts to uncover "the nerve endings of contemporary art" (as described by Tate Museum 2 curator Nicholas Serota) , forward-thinking curators continually question the way art 2 functions in response to the modem world. The curator must translate into exhibitions, catalogs, and discussions, concepts and forms that have yet to be defined, much less understood. Exposing and promoting the nerve endings of contemporary art demands participation outside of and attention beyond mainstream culture. Marcia Tucker, founder of the New Museum and one of the subjects of this paper, called this loving the margins. "I always feel that the margins tell you more than the center of the page ever could. Loving the margins is risky, because you're not only in unfamiliar territory, but often in hostile 3 terrain as well" . Marginalized, one is able to, and often forced to, access work and ideas beyond "the center of the page" of traditional art forms and cultural assumptions. The margins reflect independent thinking rather than the perpetuation of extant cultural structures. When new art is presented to contemporary audiences, historical facts and cultural consensus are not yet available to ensure the import of the work or to allay fear of the unknown. "You can't put something that's just been done into history; you've got to talk about its creative impact for the moment. A new work by a new artist is not 4 history. It is the present". In Women's Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830-1930, Kathleen McCarthy asserts that "women, not men, took the greatest gambles on the art of the 5 future, the untested, the untried." Consequently, my research has emphasized the importance of the careers of three courageous women who shifted the boundaries of the twentieth-century art world: Betty Parsons, Marcia Tucker, and Alanna Heiss. Each in 3 her own way fundamentally challenged and changed the way the world perceives and interacts with art. Betty Parsons opened the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1946 in New York City. Dubbed by Artnews the "den mother of Abstract Expressionism" the following year, Parsons discovered and promoted, over the course of her forty-year career, such prominent artists as Hans Hofmann, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Tuttle. By presenting some of the most innovative and exciting artists of her time Parsons "largely defined avant-garde art in America". 6 Discussing her passion for the avant-garde and her belief in promoting her artists, Parsons remarked "I think I was born with a love for the unfamiliar. How else can you describe it? I had no idea I had this talent-an 'eye' ...Everyone has instincts, but having faith in them is something you have to work for" .7 Marcia Tucker began her career in 1969 as the first female curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Eleven years after her appointment to that position she was fired for her unapologetic selection of artists and installations that pushed audiences and museum trustees far beyond their comfortable expectations of what a museum should be. Tucker responded to her dismissal by founding the New Museum in New York. She created a "new museum" to create a new model within the current museum system. Director of the New Museum for 22 years, she presided over, "a somewhat chaotic, idealistic place where the nature of art was always in question, exhibitions were a form of 8 consciousness-raising, and mistakes were inevitable". 4 Alanna Heiss first made her mark in the 1970's by transforming abandoned and unused buildings throughout New York into exhibition venues for site-specific art. With her hand in as many as ten empty buildings at any given moment in time, Heiss eventually focused her energies into a dilapidated New York Public School, P.S. l, which would become the largest center forcontemporary art in the United States. In 2000, she successfully managed a merger with the Museum of Modern Art, making P.S.l one of the most significant and high profile alternative arts spaces in the world. According to its current director, Klaus Bisenbach, "Since P.S. l was founded, it has had a history of working with artists, and because it has no collection of its own, it can do programs that more traditional contemporary art museums cannot do. We can react fast and allow for risk and failure".9 In 2008, when Heiss was forced by MoMA Director Glen Lowry to resign from PSI, she founded Art on Air, an Internet radio station, online audio archive for cultural programming, gallery space, and studio program. Utterly unflappable throughout her career, Heiss remains today, at age 67, on the forefront of artistic and technological experimentation and risk-taking. All three women experienced public doubt, outrage, and confusion throughout their long careers. Each operated on the precarious edge between genius and failure in order to truly promote the new. Artist John Baldesarri explains that "art comes out of failure ... you have to try things out. You can't sit around, terrified of being incorrect, saying, 'I won't do anything until I do a masterpiece"'. 10 The same is true of the curator who promotes 5 new forms of art-innovation is perceived as dangerous and certainly involves the risk of failure. Confronted with art that "does not look like art," audiences can be perplexed and wary of being duped. Parsons, Tucker and Heiss each forged ahead in the art world, trusting their instincts yet unable to definitively explain how the work they presented might prove worthy of the risks they took forit. As Tucker describes: I got used to saying things like, 'the most important works of art raise more questions than they answer.' I believed it, but it was a tough sell in an art world that demanded answers .... 'I don't know' is the honest answer when you're working investigatively, but it can get you in trouble. You're supposed to know, and if you don't you're going to be seen as unprofessional rather than adventurous.11 In their atypical approaches to art and culture, each met with substantial roadblocks. Critical reviews of their efforts tended to be derisive; vandalism abounded in their exhibition spaces. To many, these women were too independent and pushed the bounds of their respective roles too far. Through sheer will and a staunch commitment to iconoclasm, they furtherignited debate about the arts and the role of women in society. Over time, all three were lauded as progressive leaders and pioneers of the new. To better understand the context from which these women arose and the challenges they faced, my research will situate them in theirrespective moments in the New York art world, from the 1913 Armory Show through today. The main focus of the paper will explore each woman as an individual: the life she lived, her challenges and successes, and 6 her particular motivations forrisk taking and perseverance. Through research, interviews, and personal narratives, this paper will tease out commonalities and patterns in the histories of these three exceptional women and their unflaggingdevotion to cutting-edge art and artists who signified"the spirit of change that is within and about us, the spirit of 12 unrest, of the striving, of the searching for greater and more beautiful things".